Random World
Written by Kristine Ong Muslim. Copyright © 2001 All Rights Reserved.
At first, I couldn't believe Jason when he told me he was not a human being.
We were sitting before the lake on a Saturday afternoon in April. It was a clear day, and the grass on the other side of the lake looked twice as green as my mother’s green uniform. There was no room for a joke that day. Perhaps that’s why Jason decided it was the right time in my life to confess.
The world around was so silent silence was audible. I had no choice but to do the same. I simply sat there with Jason, that Saturday afternoon in April, confused, a little weary, and for some reason I couldn’t tell, wildly excited. It was like knowing it was a great privilege, a personal triumph—maybe better, even, than knowing alone the equation to the fate of the universe, or how it’d been like the few nanoseconds before the Big Bang. I felt like I’d burst with too much pride, fear, confusion, an admixture of about eleven emotions known to man. I flunked every test in school and yet I knew of one rare secret not even grown-ups like Mr. Durhart, the grumpy school librarian, and Miss Evvie Jarsed, my beautiful science teacher, could quantify. Deep inside I wanted to go and tell them about Jason and relieve myself of the burden. But what if they laughed and dragged me to the loony bin? Grown-ups were like that: what they couldn’t understand in terms of manmade logic they just dismissed as mad.
So, between me and my only friend Jason, I agreed to make a promise I knew I would keep forever.
Poolhopping
Written by Andrew Bomback. Copyright © 2001 All Rights Reserved.
If my mother was still alive, I'd tell her that I finally experienced a "certification." She'd know what I meant by that. It's from her favourite book -- The Moviegoer by Walker Percy -- and it's a term the narrator uses when he goes to see a movie with a scene showing the neighbourhood of the theatre he's sitting in. The guy gets all excited about it, and I remember having no idea why he was so worked up. I was fifteen when I read it. I don't read much but I read it the first few days after my mother died because it was her favourite book and I was allowed to stay home from school and didn't feel like watching any television for some reason.
Edgar made me promise not to tell Jim about the pills, because Jim is a pot fiend and he'd be any other kind of drug fiend if he had access to it, so Edgar didn't even want to entice Jim. "He's weak," Edgar said to me one night as we were floating on our backs in the heated pool on Montgomery Lane. Jim was lying on the grass beside the pool, smoking the remains of a joint that he had found in the pocket of his shorts. "He'll always be weak," Edgar went on, "and it'll be our responsibility, for the rest of our lives, to look after his sorry ass."
Read More.The Crookedness of Being
Written by Darren Speegle. Copyright © 2001 All Rights Reserved.
My piss fled back into my organ. At the foot of the wall opposite, on the ground, lay a body--a woman. I stepped over, knowing she was dead, turned away at the sight of the dark fluid that surrounded her, so much of it the scent forced its way up my nostrils. She'd been shot.
Sometimes the strangest part about being there is being there. That was damn well the case that night in ‘The Whaler’ as I sipped my hard Scotch and wondered how many years it had been since I'd had a genuine ‘déjà vu’. The feeling had hit me the moment I walked in out of the December night, and hung with me well after I was obliged to answer the ‘Whuddya have’? of the embittered bartender, who wanted nothing better than to have the greasy glass in front of me so he wouldn't have to think about my patch of counter again for awhile. Not that he had a booming business tonight. It was Christmas Eve, and only the most pathetic of us were out.
Christmas Eve. It was why I was here, actually. My regular haunts were closed-as any self-respecting dive should have been-so I'd come down Waterfront to see what was about. Now common sense says that a man who enjoys his meagre existence does his best to stay away from the Waterfront. I wish I'd had some of that, instead of the blues, that Friday night couple years back, wish I'd had even a snifter of that. Cause I was ripe for the undoing the moment I first stepped foot in that godforsaken hole. Goddamn all of us, I say, but bring us home again when you're finished, old man.
Five Poems
Written by Ernest Hilbert. Copyright © 2001 All Rights Reserved.
LA MAIN DE DIEU (THE HAND OF GOD)
Appeared as conqueror flanked by spirits
Drawing light down Avenue of the Americas —
Tomb of harpies, Theseus emerging
From shadow dust of urinal
With cocaine haloed under his nose,
Hailing barmaid for more cold vodka
To blank sight of abandonment
And smoke going up from shelled villages
When Persians encircled his surrendering men
Outside Kraków, machine-gunned his officers,
When T-34s slipped down streets on ice
Over the steaming mass of bodies